A variety of software programs have been available for computers. In some cases, the operation of a computer running a software program may be verified, and then the software program may be modified and tuned for energy saving and performance improvement. As a method for the operation verification, there has been proposed a method of identifying an instruction being executed from the program counter of a Central Processing Unit (CPU) at fixed cycles during the execution of a target program for which information is collected, finding memory addresses accessed for reading or storing data, and obtaining the access frequency for each memory address.
Please see, for example, Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2008-210011.
Energy consumption of a computer running a program may be measured with a measurement device that measures energy consumption. Energy consumption for each executed part (for example, a subroutine or an operating range of a source program) of a program may be analyzed by sampling a memory address at which an instruction being executed is stored and cumulative energy consumption measured by the measurement device at predetermined intervals. For example, there is room for an improvement in the code description corresponding to executed parts with relatively high energy consumption.
However, the intervals for updating measurement data by the measurement device may be longer than the intervals at which the program to be verified changes its behavior. For example, at a certain time, the memory address of an instruction being executed on a computer is obtained, and measurement data obtained by the measurement device is referenced. Then, at the next time, the memory address of an instruction being executed is obtained, but the measurement data to be referenced may not have been updated by the measurement device. In this case, the energy consumption between these times is observed to be zero. That is to say, incorrect energy consumption may be obtained for some executed parts.